Government > Leaders Stats: compare key data on Italy & Poland

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STAT	Italy	Poland	HISTORY
Head of state > Term limit for head of state	7 Ranked 8th. 40% more than Poland	5 Ranked 34th.
President	Giorgio Napolitano	Bronislaw Komorowski
President > Profile	<p>Giorgio Napolitano was re-elected as president of Italy in April 2013 - the first time in the history of the Italian republic that an incumbent president had been voted in to serve a second term.</p> <p>The 87-years-old Mr Napolitano had previously signalled that he was keen to retire and had ruled himself out as a candidate, but after five rounds of voting failed to elect a new president, he was prevailed upon to stand as a consensus candidate in the sixth round.</p> <p>In that ballot, he secured 738 votes out of a possible total of 1,007 that could be cast by the combined chambers of parliament.</p> <p>Mr Napolitano&#039;s re-election came in the wake of an inconclusive parliamentary election in February 2013 that gave rise to protracted negotiations over the formation of a new government.</p> <p>During this period, the president came to be seen as a guarantor of stability. However, those pushing for change and a radical shake-up of the old political class saw Mr Napolitano&#039;s re-election as a further sign of political stagnation.</p> <p>Giorgio Napolitano began his first term of office in May 2006, when he was sworn in as Italy&#039;s 11th post-war president.</p> <p>The former member of the Italian Communist Party was among the leading architects of the party&#039;s transformation into a social-democratic movement.</p> <p>The Italian president heads the armed forces and has powers to veto legislation, disband parliament and call elections.</p> <p>For most of his first term, Mr Napolitano preferred to remain distant from the often treacherous world of Italian parliamentary politics, and so when he did intervene directly - as happened in November 2011, when he issued a not-so-coded message to the political class to examine its conscience and acknowledge collective responsibility for the crisis facing the country - his words carried considerable weight.</p>	<p>Bronislaw Komorowski, the speaker of parliament, became acting president on the death of President Lech Kaczynski in a plane crash in April 2010. He defeated Mr Kaczynski&#039;s twin brother and former prime minister, Jaroslaw, in the July second round of the presidential election.</p> <p>A leading figure in the centre-right Civic Platform party, Mr Komorowski has served in several post-Communist governments since 1989, including a term as defence minister in 2000-2001.</p> <p>He became speaker in 2007, and Civic Platform adopted him as its candidate for the presidential elections due in the autumn of 2010. These were brought forward to June-July on the death of President Kaczynski.</p> <p>Born in 1952 and an historian by profession, Mr Komorowski was active in the anti-Communist civil rights movement from the 1970s.</p>
President > Summary	President Giorgio Napolitano has been a stabilising influence on Italian political life	President Komorowski was active in the civil rights movement in the 1970s
Prime Minister	Enrico Letta (resigned)	Donald Tusk
Prime Minister > Profile	<p>After less than a year in the job, Enrico Letta resigned as prime minister in February 2014, after his Democratic Party (PD) voted in favour of an urgent change of government to push through reforms. </p> <p>President Giorgio Napolitano then asked PD leader and mayor of Florence, Matteo Renzi, to form a new government.</p> <p>Mr Letta was named prime minister in April 2013 after inconclusive elections at a time when Italy was mired in recession. </p> <p>He forged a coalition with former premier Silvio Berlusconi&#039;s conservatives - an unusual alliance of bitter rivals - as well as centrists led by former prime minister Mario Monti.</p> <p>The creation of the coalition at first appeared to pave the way for yet another political comeback for Mr Berlusconi, who was forced to resign in 2011 as Italy slid deeper into the eurozone&#039;s sovereign debt crisis. </p> <p>Mr Letta&#039;s appointment of a protege of Mr Berlusconi, Angelino Alfano, as his deputy initially raised suspicions that the scandal-tainted billionaire tycoon would continue to call the shots from the sidelines.</p> <p>However, the former prime minister&#039;s accumulating criminal convictions cast a shadow over the future of the coalition, and the Supreme Court&#039;s upholding of a custodial sentence for Mr Berlusconi in the first of these cases in August 2013 caused further tremors within the government.</p> <p>Mr Berlusconi responded to moves to expel him from parliament and deprive him of his immunity from arrest by attempting to bring down the government. This move backfired when Mr Alfano refused to follow the instructions of his former mentor and formed his own breakaway centre-right faction.</p> <p>But even after having been finally flung out of parliament in November, Mr Berlusconi continued to insist that he would remain a force in Italian politics as the leader of Forza Italia - a party that still enjoys considerable electoral support.</p> <p>Mr Letta, aged 46 at the time of his inauguration, is a moderate with a reputation as a political bridge-builder.</p> <p>On taking office said he would act fast to reverse an austerity policy he argued was killing Italy and called on Europe to become a motor for growth.</p> <p>But tensions within his own party over the pace of reform and differences over economic policy came to a head after Matteo Renzi was elected leader of the PD in December 2013. Mr Renzi forced a showdown in which the PD backed his vision of a new government that could implement &quot;profound change&quot; and get Italy &quot;out of the quagmire&quot;. Mr Letta had no choice but to step down. </p>	<p>The governing coalition led by Mr Tusk won a decisive victory in the October 2011 parliamentary election, putting him on course to serve a second term as prime minister.</p><p>His campaign had stressed his reputation as a safe pair of hands and a competent manager of the Polish economy.</p> <p>It was the first time an incumbent government was returned to office for another term since the reintroduction of democracy in 1989. Analysts said the result was a sign of Poland&#039;s growing political stability after two decades of fractious politics.</p> <p>Mr Tusk became PM when he formed a coalition between his centre-right Civic Platform and the centrist Peasants Party after the parliamentary elections of October 2007.</p> <p>The early elections were forced by the collapse of the right-wing coalition led by Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the identical twin of the then president Lech Kaczynski.</p> <p>In his first term, Mr Tusk&#039;s government pursued a policy of close cooperation with the European Union. It also sought to use EU funds modernise Poland and privatise state enterprises.</p> <p>Mr Tusk advocates deeper EU integration and eventual euro membership for Poland.</p>
Prime Minister > Summary	Enrico Letta led a grand coalition	Donald Tusk is serving his second term as premier

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